Nudge theory: Influencing empowered teams to do the things that matter to you

Successful DevOps means empowering teams. “You build it, you run it” is a fine principle, but it means you need to let your teams make their own choices. But you still have things you want all teams to do, and you need to balance the benefits of the right technologies against the costs of running multiple data stores, deployment platforms, languages, etc.

I’ll offer a brief overview of nudge theory and the EAST framework developed by the UK government’s Behavioural Insights team as a framework for influencing behaviour and explore what nudge theory can teach us about making it easy and attractive for disparate teams to do things for the common good.